Project Natick is a research project to build an underwater datacenter. The idea behind the Project Natick is to provide a datacenter solution, which will be low cost, energy-efficient, self-sustaining aims to provide low-latency and high-agility to cloud users all over the world.
Project Natick was initiated in 2014.
In Phase 1, Data Centre "Leona Philpot" was deployed underwater approximately one kilometer off the Pacific coast of the United States, in 2015.
"Leona Philpot" was kept underwater from August 2015 to December 2015 and a series of tests was conducted. The major factors included in the tests were "power consumption" and "temperature".
After which datacenter "Leona Philpot" was lifted out of the ocean and brought back to Microsoft head office, Redmond, for analysis and refitting.
In Project Natick Phase 2, they have deployed datacenter "Northern Isles" on the sea floor.
Fabrication of datacenter "Northern Isles" was completed in the last May. All IT equipment was installed and tested. It was shipped to Stromness, UK on June 01, 2018.
"Northren Isles" is a shipping container size datacenter. It was deployed in the sea near Scotland's Orkney Island. Scotland is the largest test side in the world for renewable green energy like tidal and wave energy. "Northern Isles" is powered by a combination of solar power, wind power, and offshore tidal and wave energy.
The life span of this datacenter is claimed to be 5 years.
The sources for this post are:
news.microsoft.com
natick.research.microsoft.com
